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Hey L8X devs. Sorry to prod, but the editors who I'm working with are chomping at the bit to roll out OJS rather than our current proprietary workflow software. The only piece of the puzzle we're missing is the DOC conversion. I know you guys have probably been hard at work on 2.2.1 and all sorts of other things, but do you have a guess on when L8X will hit? They're about ready to send me on a mission to do the work of .DOC -> .RTF or .PDF (via Docvert) on my own, and I really, really, really don't want to do all of the work that you have likely done already.

As usual, things have been quiet because we've been heads-down on getting Lemon8-XML in shape for release. The good news is that we are planning on (finally) releasing the public beta near the end of this week. There have been numerous delays and diversions, but we are hopeful that this will give eager editors such as yours an opportunity to get a feel for the software and provide us with some much-needed field testing and feedback.

I'm putting some of the final touches on as we speak, but one thing to note: as this is still just the beta, there are a number of areas which are still not fully developed. In order to have automatic document conversion, you will have to set up and configure a Docvert instance, although once that is done, you can simply point L8X at the Docvert URL and it will take advantage of it. We do have plans for a Google Docs integration this summer, which should make it easier for users who aren't able to set up Docvert.

mj wrote:As usual, things have been quiet because we've been heads-down on getting Lemon8-XML in shape for release. The good news is that we are planning on (finally) releasing the public beta near the end of this week.

This is great news MJ. I'll sit tight and watch closely. In the mean time I'll get Docvert set up on our host machine to make the testing process easier. Can you say anything more about a "Docvert instance?" Or will I just get it as I get Docvert set up?

As you've already seen, Matthew's working on making Docvert as easy to install as possible. For what it's worth, I've been setting up server-based OpenOffice converters for years, and usually the tricky parts come down to a few areas:

OpenOffice seems to work best when installed on a Linux/Unix system, and the more recent/supported, the better

if you can get GUI access to the machine, even over VNC, it makes troubleshooting much easier

take your time with user permissions, and check them carefully (especially root/admin permissions)

I have successfully installed OpenOffice and Docvert on a number of platforms, through innumerable hoops: Mac OSX, various flavours of Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian), via X11, VNC, and headless using xvfb. I've never tried on a Windows machine, so I couldn't say whether it'd be easier or harder. If you're going to take the latest Docvert 3.4 out for a spin, I'd love to hear comments on your experience so we can share them with others who are looking to do the same.

Matthew has done a great job on making Docvert easier to install, and has actually been gracious enough to help me out in this process. At this point we've basically run into the problem that the Linux install flavor that was on the machine was not new enough. So I'm working with my hosting service to get the machine updated.

This seems to be a limitation more of OOo than anything related to Docvert. We've (Matthew mostly) found a couple of Linux flavor changes, but otherwise the limitation seems to be getting OOo set up via only an SSH login. This is a dedicated machine, so I can see about getting VNC installed on it.